Discussing an Agenda for a Democratized Economy So it is the People’s Economy

By Gary Berg-Cross

Saturday, Nov 3rd, from (2-4 p.m.) the MDC chapter of WASH will have a talk Margaret Flowers & Kevin Zeese (co-directors of Its Our Economy) entitled: "Shifting Economic and Political Power to the People. ”  This will be at the Wheaton regional library 11701 Georgia Avenue  Wheaton, MD 20902.


As attorney Kevin Zeese notes the Roman philosopher/statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero defined “Freedom” as “participation in power.” By that standard most of we Americans are not free since do not participate in real power and decision making. Yes, we get to vote every now and then, but this seems a distant form of influence now.  Real power resides in organizations like the Bank of America which has spent millions lobbying the US Congress to pass laws that benefit then directly or indirectly by deregulating industry. One example cited is their spending millions to oppose bills like the Credit Cardholders Bill of Rights &  the Foreclosure Prevention Act, Helping Families Save their Homes Act, Mortgage Reform and Anti-Predatory Lending Act, all of which would have directly benefited consumers and hence the Public. 

Self advancement and deregulation explains in part why our system could not avoid a Bush-era economic/financial system collapse in 2008.  This followed the longer, contextual 30 year decline of basically stagnant and minimized worker wages. The result has been to produce a numbing, record household, personal and educational debt. 

An article on the Its Our Economy site described the scene this way:

At the same time working Americans saw jobs disappearing, hours reduced, salaries shrinking and more under-employment.  They also saw their retirement savings disappear, 5 million foreclosures, record bankruptcies, record poverty and shrinking housing values.  The cost of everything from health care, to food to energy kept rising while incomes fell. And, the social safety net, limited as it was compared to other developed countries, was shredded, a process continuing as austerity budgets take hold across the United States.

Why doesn’t the economy work better for most Americans? 

One particular chicken and egg problem seems to be the growing wealth gap caused in part by stagnant wages and debt. This inequality creates an imbalance of actual intertwined economic & political power. Eggs that hatch from such confluence craft economic and political policies that seemed designed to extract wealth from the economy and direct it at a favored few. The result is a form of structural poverty leading to struggle on many fronts (education, health care, home ownership, saving etc.). 

Margaret & Kevin will describe a 20 point:“ strategy and tactics to shift economic power, and thereby political power, to the people. “

As time permits they may cover parts of their 20 point agenda to stabilizes the economy in the short term & turn things around from misguided policy to a more sustainable democratic economy. The outlined action evolved from a Prosperity Agenda (www.ProsperityAgenda.US) written in 2009 to provide for a democratized economy that combines policies that have proven to be effective along with innovative new solutions.  Here are highlights of the proposal.

*  *  *

New, Efficient, Clean Energy Economy
1. The foundation for a new economy is a carbon-free/nuclear-free energy economy; that distributes energy production down to individual homes and businesses and uses energy efficiently.  
2. The U.S. automobile industry, recovering from near collapse, is caught in the web of long-term costs for its retired and current employees, especially the uncontrollable cost of health care and rapidly changing transit needs.  Further, the auto industry has to move toward the new green economy, instead continuing to build SUV’s rather than hybrids and electric cars.
3. Infrastructure in the United States is literally falling apart and not keeping up with the needs for a sustainable carbon-free/nuclear-free energy economy. Long term investment is needed for new infrastructure. 
4. The U.S. and world need to dramatically reduce carbon emissions. A critical step is to tax carbon emissions at the source as they enter the economy, i.e. tax coal, oil and gas for their emissions

5. Develop local economies to reduce use of fossil fuel in transport and allow local businesses and communities to flourish. 
Creating Jobs, Providing Housing, Health Care and Building Local Economies
6. Individuals as well as state and local governments are in fragile financial positions and thus in need of an economic and social safety net.
7. Another tool for developing local economies, particularly around housing and land use. This is a nonprofit corporation which acquires and manages land on behalf of the residents of a community.
8. To address housing we must stop the mortgage crisis by requiring mortgage holders to reconfigure mortgages to allow homeowners to stay in their homes and not lose them to foreclosure. 
9. Face up to the health care crisis which is approaching 20% of U.S. GDP.  The United States has the most cost-inefficient health care system in the world.

End the Wars and Reduce the Military Budget
10. End the Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Libyan wars and reduce military spending.  The United States needs to end a foreign policy based on empire and militarism

Re-making Finance, Shared Prosperity
11. Transform corporate welfare into taxpayer investment. Even before the current bailout, the U.S. government provided hundreds of billions of dollars annually to big business interests in loans, tax breaks, under-valued access to federal lands and a host of other mechanisms. 
12. Democratize access to financing by re-making the Federal Reserve and re-forming the nation’s money system. The Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors leadership is the exact opposite of democracy; it is control of the money system by the wealthy few, plutocracy.
13. Democratize corporate power by increasing shareholder rights, expanding the rights of shareholders to choose directors of corporations and submit resolutions to set the direction and priorities of the corporation they invest in and of which they are part owners. End corporate personhood, so that corporations do not have the rights of human beings. 
Financing the Government: Taxes and Deficits
14. Reconsider the tax structure to make it more equitable. 
15. Be mindful of the deficit and debt at all levels of government but also recognize there times when government must spend to rebuild the economy. 
Workers Rights
16. Democratize the workplace by encouraging employee-owned businesses
17. Reduce the work week with no reduction in pay. Before the economic collapse, 7% of the U.S. GDP was based on consumer buying.  Since the early 1970s wages have been flat in the U.S. and the consumer economy has continued because of two-income families, increasing personal debt and cheap goods from abroad.  This is unsustainable
18. Establish a national guaranteed income for all Americans based on the model proposed by Richard Nixon in 1969.
International Trade and Finance
19. End World Bank and IMF dominance (which means ending U.S. and European dominance) of the world financial markets.  These entities need competition and regional banks in Latin America, Asia, Africa and other regions should encouraged as should stabilization funds to assure currency stabilization.  These organizations need to be democratized, made more transparent and include appropriate representation and decision-making by developing nations.
20. Remake international trade from corporate trade to people’s trade.  The current rhetoric calls trade agreements “Free Trade” but in reality they are trade agreements that favor corporations over the interests of labor, the environment and consumers.  Trade agreements need to be redesigned so they serve the interests of people and the planet rather than the interests of corporations. 

Kevin Zeese, co-director of Its Our Economy, is an attorney who has been a political activist since graduating from George Washington Law School in 1980.  He works on peace, economic justice, criminal law reform and reviving American democracy.

Margaret Flowers, co-director of Its Our Economy, is a Maryland pediatrician. After graduation from the University of Maryland School of Medicine in 1990 and completion of pediatric residency at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Flowers worked first as a hospitalist and then in private practice. She left practice in 2007 to advocate full-time for a single payer health care system at both the state and national levels.

Images

Hierarchy of Power: http://griid.org/2012/09/11/a-grand-rapids-power-analys/

Carbon Democracy: http://www.amazon.com/Carbon-Democracy-Political-Power-Age/dp/1844677451

Democracy and Alternatives: http://www.srilankaguardian.org/2011_11_01_archive.html

Kevin: http://portland.indymedia.org/en/topic/economicjustice/newswire/archive44.shtml

Margaret: http://portland.indymedia.org/en/topic/economicjustice/newswire/archive44.shtml

Being “Smart” Doesn’t Mean There Aren’t Blind Spots

by Gary Berg-Cross

Smart vs. dumb seems like a simple dichotomy. No one likes to thought of as dumb, let along being called dumb publically. It’s generally a good thing to be considered intelligent and informed and able to think rationally. Of course we have models or absent minded professors and deep thinkers that are socially clueless and inept at ordinary tasks. But we have a general sense that knowledge is power and that intelligence (along with a dose of skepticism and a good method) can expose the truth and the truth is better than falsehood and critical investigation is a better long-term strategy than uncritical acceptance.

We are stunned to hear uniformed opinions and willful ignorance expressed as facts as in ““keep your government hands off MY Medicare” But Cornell political scientist Suzanne Mettler has shown that a large % of recipients of government benefits somehow don’t believe they’ve received any benefits.

Wild generalizations like “corporations are people my friend… of course they are…Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to the people.” can also rankle, since there are so many counterarguments to hidden, common sense assumptions. Willard Romney said this in August 2011 while attempting to counter an argument that taxes should be raised on corporations as part of balancing the budget. Romney is smart all right and Harvard trained, so why the blind spot about how his thinking comes across as false, but yet appeals to so many? Seems like a bit of a paradox, which you may have experienced in talking about such things with seemingly intelligent supporters of such policies. But it is wider and gain you may have experienced this when talking to elite professionals on topics that are outside their training.  Little is funnier than having a lawyer or economist ask you not to use too many technical terms or speak in simple sentences on scientific topics. One may be trainied and intelligent and still yearn for simple answers when they may not be so available.

Simple, contemporary political statements like corporations are people ring hollow since we can ask if corporations have to follow the same rules as we humans and be responsible in the same way. This is clearly not what it means nor is the idea that all the benefits wind up in “the people’s” hands. Some of the people’s wealth seems to be missing.

These type of seemingly smart vs. dumb dichotomy abounds in freethinkers’ vs. religious arguments over evolution and the verbal barbs thrown such as :

I love how the atheists on blogs like to act like they're a part of an elite squad who are masters of logic and reason.

It is true that simple logic can expose some silly arguments justifying religion which seems in part defended by an element of willful disbelief. Such styles are part of larger factors than reasonability that produces a spectrum that is not just elite smartness or general dumbness. Some people seem to dislike atheists and freethinkers just because they ask difficult question which challenge others to answer about open ended topics like morality. And most of us like to think we are on the right side of moral issues. I show my bona fides and the case is closed. I don’t have to exhaust my self in a long change of reasoning supported by evidence.The point here is that our supposed intelligence is often blinded by competing cognitive and social factors.

 In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Nobel prize Daniel Kahneman (subject earlier blogs on knowing) points out how such slow, carefully thinking is often the poor minority of reasoning. Research is such areas helps understand some of the blind spots and disputed implied above. It’s because reasoning is part of a pretty complex system evolved over time and engaged in particular ways by culture and cultural elites (e.g lawyers, economists & clergy).

There are fast associations that we make when a topic comes up and thus questioning suitable religious (or political) authority which has status in culture. Attacking religion seems anti-social and unpatriotic to those who value social cohesiveness. After all won’t such things lead to socialism or communism?

Into this discussion we now throw the idea of cognitive biases and intuitive thinking. It is the humbling realization (as reported recently) that bright people can be especially prone to stupid mistakes. After all the work on human, cognitive bias shows that we are subject to systematic cognitive errors. It is just that different people have different degrees for particular types. If we have good memories we make react to a Pol flip flopping on his/her position. If we associate government with bad things we may accept some statement with little support since it is consistent with our beliefs. But it turns out that a general intelligence doesn’t really protect us from holding and defending stupid positions. Indeed a simple higher intelligence (as measured by S.A.T. scores) can make things worse. This is the understanding of research (by West & friends) that looked at awareness of faulty reasoning or a blind spot. West and his colleagues began by giving 482 undergraduates a questionnaire featuring a variety of classic bias problems. Here’s a example so you can judge the problem:

In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of the lake?

An intuitive, short cut response is to divide the 48 in half. That gives an answer of twenty-four days. Sorry that’s wrong. The correct solution is forty-seven days. After all it doubles every day!!!

The wrong answer seems easy to get to that somewhat intelligence people fall prey to it, but think it right and defend the answer since after all, I am smarter than the average and therefore must be right. A humbling thought is what seems to be an ever increasingly American meritocracy that with Pols like Romney represents more of a de facto oligarchy. It is perhaps a bit of an insight into why there seem so wild thinking, but smugly confident politicians in America. 

For more see Jonah Lehrer's article in the New Yorker and Blind Spots: Why Smart People Do Dumb Things

Behind the Scenes in the Attack on Planned Parenthood

By Gary Berg-Cross

Edd Doerr, Explicit Atheist and others have discussed the “brou ha ha” around HHS mandated regulations on birth control and the claim of a religious exemption for Catholic institutions based on conscience. Some conservative pols have characterized that struggle as another front of the war on religion, while many see it as an attack on vulnerable, often poor women, ever a silenced majority.

I find it interesting that while this has been going on we’ve seen an attack on Planned Parenthood and its funding. Activists had been applying political pressure on Komen for years to not support health care provider Planned Parenthood because it offers abortion. An example was the deceptive Video ‘Sting’ attacking Planned Parenthood which as called a “Dishonest Hit Job is Part of Religious Right’s Campaign to Deny Women Access to Reproductive Health Care” by People for the American Way.

The anti-abortion crowd found a vehicle for their attach by getting some leverage on the Komen Foundation. Karen Handel, a Republican who once ran for governor of Georgia on a platform calling for the defunding of Planned Parenthood, seems to have been at the center of that effort. During her campaign for office she wrote when she pledged to eliminate all state funds for breast and cervical cancer screening to the group if she were elected governor:

“[S]ince I am pro-life, I do not support the mission of Planned Parenthood,”

After failing to become governor in a tea-party like campaign. Handle became senior Vice President (for public policy) of the Susan G. Komen charity almost a year ago and seems to have continued her campaign. According to the Huffington Post Komen insiders say Handel got defunding on the agenda and spent months pushing a plan to shift the organization's grant strategy and collaborate on a bit of a witch hunt. Emails reveal that handle was the prime instigator and argued that Komen could just say that the change is policy came about because Planned Parenthood was under investigation no one can blame us for being political HuffPo has internal emails. This lead Komen’s apparently passive and narrow thing Board to cut off funding for 17 of the 19 Planned Parenthood affiliates in December.

This is surprisingg to many but an examination of Komen leaders by Mother Jones and others shows them to be consistently conservative and opposed to Planned Parenthood. Founder and CEO Nancy G. Brinker ,who is the face we largely see in TV defending the action, served under George W. Bush as chief protocol officer for the U.S. She later served as ambassador to Hungary. Reports have noted that both she and her now late husband, Norman, have been major Republican donors.

Another member of Komen’s Advocacy Alliance Board is Jane Abraham. She is the General Chairman of the anti-choice and anti-science Susan B. Anthony List. She seems pretty political since she is on its Political Action Committee. One of Abraham roles has been as a leader to establish what they call “crisis pregnancy clinics”. These are designed to prevent any abortions. What they do is mislead women about their health and reproductive rights. Want to know another interesting connection. Abraham works with Maureen Scalia, well known wife of Supreme Court Justice Antony Scalia.

And there are other interesting political and perhaps religious connections. Ari Fleischer, former press secretary for George W. Bush pops up. I’ve been surprised and disappointed to see him and Ralph Reed on CNN as “political” commentators. It seems that discredited, conservative voices have vampire like abilities. Ari, a prominent right-wing pundit of Pinocchio level lying fame who some identify with political Chabatists, was apparently quietly involved in hiring Handel, and making the interviews of prospective candidates discuss how to handle controversy about Komen’s relationship with Planned Parenthood. Fleischer views on Planned Parenthood are documented in his book, Taking Heat. He criticized it as a partisan, ideological organization that receives undeserved positive coverage in the press. Such things seem like fuel for tea party activists, who act like bullies and are the real promoters of culture war with hot button issues that divide people. And of course Ari was available to discuss how to give Komen positive press and shield it from backlash. One hand washed another in conservative political circles.

But all that has failed and Handle has resigned. Sensible things can happened when people pay close attention to a scandal and what it reveals. And part of what it reveals is a confluence of influence makers who get leadership roles in institutions with good missions and sterling reputations. This allows work behind the scenes on conservative, often hybrid religious-political agendas. This is an old story. Some might remember how the Red Cross provided a leg up on the political career of some Republican chairman going back to Elizabeth Dole and Bernadine P. Healy, M.D. More recently Bonnie McElveen-Hunter was head of American Red Cross. She has a nice resume. Before that job she was ambassador to Finland, and before that worked for Eliz Dole's presidential bid!

The Democratic Underground argues that such things were rewards for her:

“financial support of the Bush campaign. McElveen-Hunter was reported to be one of just 15 people who raised more than $1 million for Bush's presidential run. She headed Bush's effort to raise money from women, a campaign called "W is for Women."

She personally gave $102,750 to Republican candidates and party committees during the campaign, including $100,000 in soft money to the Republican National Committee. She also contributed $5,000 to the Bush-Cheney recount effort.”

None may dare call it a conspiracy, but it does show a bit of how the system and money work and how organizations collaborate to accomplish their agenda. Such top down, power elite control occasionally get frustrated by energetic, truly grassroots responses. OWS comes to mind here, but in this case it had come from women and progressive activists who have found a voice and shone a light on a wicked brew of politics and power pushing its agenda hidden away from view. It's perhaps another episode in the struggle with reactionary forces that insist on looking back rather than ahead for wisdom.

The Scandal of Anti-Intellectualism and Elites

by Gary Berg-Cross

Like a civil society, secular humanism and its kindred freethinking cousins require a certain base mixture of tolerance, curiosity, sophisticated of thinking, respect for truth and an intellectual environment. The hard truth of contemporary America is that we swim in a tide that seems less tolerant and appreciative of sophisticated thinking, such as required to understand systems of things.

I recently wrote about Transparency into Conservative Media Influence and the soft corruption of its methods. These combine threats, bribes, distractions and plain-out lying. It's unbalanced too. I expressed the hope that a larger group of people would take the opportunity to see how things work among the real power elite. For decades, Murdoch and his empire has cultivated the ability to influence elections on both sides of the ocean. As the dominatrix of News Corp, he ruled a layered suite of British papers. He could use the daily tabloid Sun to set the tone of electoral debate and echo it with a higher-minded Times, which was then backed by more aggressive voices coming from other parts of his empire. You get the tone from the way the American Propsect described the 1992 election:

"It was The Sun Wot Won It" declared the tabloid the day after the Labour party's fourth successive General Election defeat in 1992. The surprise result followed a sustained campaign of character assassination against its leader, Neil Kinnock. Pages and days of "Nightmare on Kinnock Street" propaganda culminated in an election day front page with his head on a lightbulb: "If Neil Kinnock wins today, would the last person to leave Britain please turn off the lights?" The British public decided that Kinnock wasn't prime-minister material.

Clearly, subsequent candidates and party leaders got the threatening message. On this side of the Atlantic the Clintons didn't need to think too hard about this, since it came at them at the speed a multiple scandals backed by conservative money. In Britain later pols pragmatically sought Murdock's support or at least a pass from his active opposition. And in a democracy this all comes at a chilling price, which should get our attention for the upcoming American election.

So maybe we can learn something from the unfolding scandal and take steps to change the environment through what Jefferson stressed - learning, which is essential in a Democracy. The media hasn't been helping to provide 2 things people need - knowledge of the facts but also an historical perspective so they can understand how things have developed and who did what and why. Both are necessary to hold politicians accountable for their past acts and current plans.

After the failures of the conservative policies leading to unnecessary wars, loss of rights, inequity and a financial meltdown at the end of 8 years, have we learned too little? The 2010 election suggests that Americans remain too receptive and unskeptial about well packaged, conservative messages. All too often we are lulled into passive acceptance of lies and manufactured explanations. A convenient history is invented and packed into a tale. If that is not enough to lull us, then pop culture & distracting video images fills up the cognitive space leaving little room for reflection.

Now a scandal has our attention. For a while get to peak behind the curtain and see some of those ugly power elites relations, but also some of the techniques that influence the populace.

I've previously mentioned the use of Framing of issues and the masking role of false dichotomies. One may add that unfactual facts used on both sides of the Atlantic, but another technique is to appeal of the common man. Tabloids and Fox appeal to the common man and identify various enemy to what they call the American Way of Business, I mean Life.

For conservartive convenience the enemy is an amalgamation of liberals, gays, secularists, intellectuals etc. These are the parts of society that are out of touch with the common person as well as common sense. You can hear it from Fox & newsreaders that lip sink the party line. It opines that traditional news organizations are out of touch with the real America. Rupert Murdoch provided this talking point, when he bought the Boston Herald in 1982, complaining that other media (not his) had too much "allegiance to the upper class" which has a liberal attitude. It's a bogus claim that a healthy dose of skepticism can challenge, but mainstream media seems unable to knock intellectual elitism claims down and point to the real troubling network of allegiances. Indeed the current scandal shows a bit of what really goes on with what Janine R. Wedel calls the Shadow Elite (Shadow Elite: How the World's New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market ).

These elite are a new breed of flexible political operators ("flexions") who may serve the roles of lobbyist, government insider or elected official but who converge into a single network such as seems to be the case with Murdock's network. Wedel sees them: "snaking through official and private organizations, creating a loop that is closed to democratic processes." We saw this during the Bush administration where a a core group of flexions provided a witch's brew of power to advance several cultural transformations that favored their networks:

1. government outsourcing
2. privatization
3. deregulation, and
4. "the embrace of 'truthiness.'"

By wearing several hats simultaneously (think tanker, retired military or government official, corporate representative, "objective" expert) flexions can gain extraordinary insider knowledge and influence in order to custom-tailor a version of the "truth" benefiting the highest bidder. Some bidders are media tycoons like Murdock, but there are many others. Versions of truth can then passed as memes to a media network like Fox. In this way, they not only "co-opt public policy agendas" but "craft policy with their benefactors' purposes in mind." We end up saying, "What's the matter with Kansas, and Wisconsin etc."




Rational analysis, skepticism and critical thinking are all means of challenging shadow elite gambits and for that reason they and the intellectual power they represent are enemies that must be marginalized by the Sharow Elite.

This enemies list of intellectuals becomes a convenient whipping boy for the failings of society and its anti-intellectual message has been a long time coming. You could hear a proto-version of this enemy story in the 50s when the John Birch Society equated intellectualism with disparate philosophies like atheism and communism. Both were undermining American/Christian values. Intellectualism and intellectuals had to be defeated. To some degree they have succeeded in shoving progressives and progressive policy off to the side.

In The Age of American Unreason Susan Jacoby tells the story of the advance of anti-intellectual in the past 4+ decades. It has resulted in a flight from reason by way of a right-turn descent into a realm that combines intellectual laziness, a lack or curiosity and reflexive skepticism. Jacoby also singles out a lack of knowledge and memory that allows an outlet like Fox to fabricate an alternate, bubble world. Together these created the current anti-rational landscape, personified by the rise of the ultra right wing and its sometime creature the Tea Party. They can get away with crazy claims (like birtherism) because rational challenges are discounted. It's an environment that enables the shadow elite with its power through connections and self serving agenda to rise and thrive.



But slowing and solving this sorry state may not be as simple as identifying a dues paying member of the elite like Rupert Murdock or Larry Summers. As Jacoby notes, the anti or non-rationality seen in our governance is not a simple result of a Machiavellian plot by current politicians. They are opportunists leveraging anti-intellectual tendencies now realized and embodied in a pretty passive populace. Too many of our ordinary citizens, like their elected representatives, live without the basic set intellectual tools needed for sound public decision-making.

We need to work on this steadily. It's not just rationality at elections that matter. It's an entire life of balanced life that is needed. An respect for a richly interlinked world of ideas, truth and facts that makes for an intellectual.